Noise + Thirst is a video installation by Leila Weefur. It presents Blackness as an inhabitant of the space between noise & silence and thirst & satisfaction. The accompanying sound collage, a gestalt of Black masculinity, asks how closely must we scrutinize our Blackness to bear witness to a naturally occurring contrast?

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to state we’ve an obsession with (and aversion to) intimacy. My own curiosity emerges from an admittedly unsettled place, the unsettled place within which formative knowing and loving of my sexual self emerged: through non-platonic interactions with (and, early on, unrequited desire for) white men.

These angles on athleticism—sports as war and sports as character-building—create a familiar binary that makes up much of how we think about sports mythology. One looks to athletics for a combative origin as a sign of human’s survival instinct, and the other as a moral tool by which people grow up. But both miss the mark.

In stereotype, folklore, and the Oriental Trading catalog, the adjective “Hawaiian” evokes a place separate from reality. America’s constant backyard luau. Consequently, “Hawaiian” shirts are for retirees, golfers, slackers, and mainland denizens of Vacationland.

Sam and I are studio neighbors at Real Time and Space in Downtown Oakland. We’ve done a collaborative talk for my Black Printed Matter residency project at E.M Wolfman where we geeked out about the ways traditional printmaking has left an imprint on our art practices and moving toward decolonizing that practice.

Mastery rarely exists outside of whiteness and masculinism because mastery connotes dominion and domination: it is the template against which all things are contrasted and evaluated, it is both epoch-making and definitive.

I saw my first WNBA game in the summer of 1997 at The Forum in Inglewood. My family drove from Bakersfield to see the Los Angeles Sparks in our Dodge Caravan with dual sliding doors and a trademarked color only a seventh grader could remember: teal-island-satin glow.